The pretence of cultural hubs in the “world class” metropolis of Johannesburg and its sibling Pretoria belies revolutionary models for live performance that are at a remove from the path of “gentrification’s death march” and benevolent corporate sponsorship. Kwanele Sosibo knows and goes where boundaries are broken and new tings flourish.

One can only enter the Afrikan Freedom Station once. By that I mean each experience feels new and self-contained. This illusion has mostly to do with the incandescent powers of music.

Each act seems to cleanse and christen the place anew with each set. There’s the Malcolm Jiyane Tree’o collapsing the boundaries of composition and improv on a desolate Freedom Day. There’s Linda Buthelezi emerging from oblivion to carve his own space in the untold story of Zulu (Xulu?) rock. And there’s the instinctive archaeology of Madala Kunene and Chico Antonio’s acoustic guitar bra’skap.

In the constantly changing, but generally still-life stretch that is Thornton Road, in western Johannesburg, the Station pulses with an energy from an era six decades removed but also hitherto unseen.

Situated in Westdene, on the edge of Sophiatown, its founder regards it as a shrine “to the unacknowledged ancestors of art in the city”.

Says Steve Mokwena, founder and stationmaster: “When you’re driving on the M1 you see the spears going up. You see the malls, the churches, everybody doing it. This thing of ours, whatever you want to call it, maybe black culture… what is its expression? What is the one thing physically, in the memory of the city, that when I look at that, I see Kippie Moeketsi, I see Dolly Rathebe, I see David Koloane and Dumile Feni?”

Its gigs never turn a profit – at most, it holds roughly 40 patrons. Its bar, with R10 shots and R15 beers, probably just barely helps it tick over. Its door policy is weighted on conscience rather than the usual demand to cough up at the front door.

“The custom of the place works against it, at another level, when it comes to rands and cents,” says Bra Steve from a bench at the bar, to a soundtrack of Kendrick Lamar and Talib Kweli, “because we built it around the idea that money can come between people and art. And that’s how it grew. But on the other hand, if we get a hundred people in and they’re paying 100 bucks, then we have money to pay the band.”

Bra Steve is paradoxical without trying to be, on the one hand averse to shutting out Westdene’s tight-fisted freeloaders while, on the other, foreseeing a self-sustaining jazz economy. The man has a dervish streak, coupled with a can-do mojo probably pilfered from his own film career.

“A few years ago I watched the hip-hoppers build Back to the City, because I was very close to Hymphatic Thabs. We were working on films when they were doing that. In all of that, there was never somebody from the outside that said they are going to give them money to help them build hip-hop. People were sweating and doing it themselves. And now, that thing is able to pull about 15,000 people into the city centre when it happens. For creative music and for jazz, that is the opportunity that stares us in the face… It’s where we are supposed to be going.”

To be more accurate, Back to the City is a bloated, sponsors’ playground now, but Bra Steve is talking about laying foundations here. “There is no industry, that’s why we are able to do what we do. I feel that we could fill the Bassline with Linda Buthelezi’s show, with Malcolm [Jiyane] and somebody else’s show. We should be able to, and that’s the money. Him recording and selling that stuff.”

Outside on Thornton Road, a whites-only bar operates half-heartedly, as if its racists are slowly wavering in their convictions. Second-hand shops beg to be loosed from their lease agreements. Pentecostals have packed for St Elsewhere, in search of gullible converts. In the vacuum, it is Bra Steve doing the poaching.

“You have to be agile, you have to be clever. You know the place. There was no pizza oven. This man used to work at Catz Pyjamas,” he says, pointing to his chef, recruited from a now extinct restaurant up the hill in adjacent Melville.

The move from a jazz haunt with occasional curry to a bar with fridges stocking alcohol is purely economical for the stationmaster. Still, contributing to the “disintegration” of his patrons is, by his own admission, a sore sight. It’s like the one depicted in the admonishing tone of his film Jazz Heart, in which he confronts (literally, not figuratively) his drunken father’s abusive behaviour towards his mother.

Freedom Station is not without the protective guild of ancestors, both those to whom the music is offered and the guides who have walked the fatal road to freedom before. As Sifiso Ntuli of Politburo and House of Nsako will tell you, there is no live scene in South Africa, at least not without the sponsorship of a benevolent corporate. But there are strings attached, ones Steve has attempted to cut loose.

“I applied for a grant for this place with fund raisers who work with European funders,” he says.

“They can’t give us the money, because we don’t have an NPO. ‘Give us the board and the governance,’ they say. Kiri, let’s have an upside down conversation: ‘What are the outcomes that you are pursuing? Because social cohesion, creative self-expression, enterprise, list all of them… gender empowerment, anti-xenophobia.’ We’re not an entity that looks the part. That part is we can achieve all these outcomes and more. So do we want to look the part? No.”

The refusal to “look the part”, Bra Steve says, is because democratic societies “depend as much on functional government as they do on an obstinate citizenry that raises the bar on what it means to be a human being in the world… We’ll get to where we want to get to with what we have. You don’t do that stuff cap in hand waiting for someone to fund you.”

Bra Steve, a recovering alcoholic, says the last thing on his mind was to sell alcohol, but he “needs it to sponsor the guys…” – which I take to mean the musicians. “The white business folk who run the city’s entertainment infrastructure from Maboneng to Juta Street, to Orbit, to Norwood to Rosebank, they have a head start on us,” says Bra Steve. “They have a head start in terms of their ability to comply with a whole plethora of legislation about how to do business in this city. They have got a jump start on us in terms of capital. Because no matter how flowery my vision of Freedom Station or Sophiatown is, built on the memory of ancestors, can be, if I can’t back it up with real money and proper infrastructure…”

Bra Steve’s ultimate wish is to take the Freedom Station into Sophiatown, “buy two stands and build a cultural cathedral that will stand for this and what came before it, but you don’t do that stuff cap in hand waiting for someone to fund you.”

***

On a nippy summer’s night in Pretoria, guitarist Sibusile Xaba wears a glowing smile as he watches a quartet fronted by Oscar Rachabane wind down a number. The “glowing” is no exaggeration, of all the 20 patrons, most of them outside. Xaba seems most enraptured by the music, sitting so close to the musicians he could touch them.

The venue Rachabane’s band is playing in is a corner of a sprawling complex Xaba and a few others operate under the banner of the Capital Arts Revolution (CAR), a Pretoria-based arts movement that takes it cues from the likes of the Medu Arts Ensemble and Black Consciousness activists such as Lefifi Tladi.

Slipping outside to talk, it is like Xaba has awoken from a dream. The vision for U-The Space is one that continues to morph according to the challenges of securing an artistic base in Pretoria. In a 2015 interview conducted with the guitarist, he spoke of the venue, then two houses with a central garden-cum-courtyard in Pretoria’s Sunnyside, as a space for gardening and playing rambling sets without stressing about the clock.

But in U-The Space as it looks now, part of the multiple block Old Fire Station in central Pretoria, Xaba has to cast the occasional glance at his wrist watch. He and a few members affiliated to CAR are in a race against the City of Tshwane’s efforts to evict inhabitants and rezone the space for other use.

According to the press, the city is locked in a tug of war with an arts organisation called Ngezandla Zethu Arts, Craft and Design Hub. In reality, a group of artists are trying to run the space as the Tshwane Arts Hub it is meant to be, as opposed to the rent racket it was, allegedly, in the hands of Tshepo Nkamba, who took over Ngezandla Zethu’s affairs after his mother passed on a few years ago.

“The city views the first respondent’s conduct as unlawful hijacking of the property. None of these occupiers has a valid or otherwise lease agreement with the city allowing them to remain on the property‚” Tshepo Sithole, the city’s director of litigation management said in court papers.

“The only thing tenants are supposed to be paying here is a security levy,” says Xaba, lighting up as the band continues. A core of spectators, some of them fellow musicians, watch from outside the windows, and amble onto the parking lot to refill their drinks from the boots of their cars. “The rent was being extorted, essentially. Many people here are under Ngezandla Zethu, and then there are those that are here through the City of Tshwane.”

Xaba, I guess, speaks for those who see further potential in the space, there out of their own volition, driven by the necessity to create.

“Because the eviction notices kept coming, there were meetings to form a formal organisation that would manage the space, when we came in, last year July or August. We came in with a lot of questions. That’s when everything started coming up. The structure was never formal before. There was never such a thing. Artists were basically being used as a front, to say they were carrying out the mandate of the city but there wasn’t development.”

Referring to U-The Space specifically, Phemelo Sello, a slightly built man with dreadlocks styled into a bun, says he has been a part of the building since January 2015, when U-The Space started running an arts and music programme in one wing of the structure.

“It’s been occupied steadily since it stopped operating as a fire station; over time people have come. The arts hub transitioned after people had been living here for a while, so that makes it quite hard for it to be just about the arts, because there was already a community here.”

The Old Fire Station currently houses a mix of artists and craft makers, many with no allegiance to the Capital Arts Revolution. However, it is the site of countless gigs that disprove the myth of Pretoria as an artless capital, thanks to CAR.

The city has designated it as a heritage site, based on the age of the building. The Ditsong Museum of National History is next door, as well, and, according to Sello, archaeologists have found some artefacts in the grounds, which bolstered the case for the site to be considered a heritage site.

“They found small smoking pipes, handles for blades, from before the fire station got built on top of it,” says Sello.

In a sense, the Old Fire Station is the African Freedom Station’s still colonised but occupied cousin, brimming with ideals propagated by the very artists who, in other parts of the country and the world, are feted for their originality and vision. In Pretoria, they are merely occupiers and squatters who have to prove their worth.

Sello’s declaration about the smoking pipes, even though he doesn’t say so himself, suggests that an arm of CAR will hang on to this space for the very same reason the City of Tshwane wants it back: it is, in a sense, previously inhabited ancestral ground. The thought recalls CAR co-founder Lerato Kuzwayo standing in the dank bowels of the dome-shaped Capital Theatre, proclaiming the surrounding Church Square to have probably been a precolonial seat of chief Tshwane.

Ndumiso Dladla, a lecturer of philosophy at the University of South Africa and a convener of Philosophy in the Park, a collaborative project that takes place in association with CAR, says part of this organisation’s struggles are its limited legal clout and the shoddy state of bureaucratic record keeping in the city.

“The state has limited knowledge of its own properties, it doesn’t know what it owns. It took forever to establish that Capital Theatre (a Renaissance style theatre off the Square that now serves as a damp parking lot) belonged to the Department of Public Works. The legal process at the fire station is ultimately layered. CAR is not even the first respondent in the case with the city. There are sixteen others and CAR is enjoined as [just] another party.”

Kuzwayo says everything, for now, is consolidating around the Old Fire Station “as a venue we have access to for now.”

For all the supposed progressiveness, and – to use a hackneyed World Cup phrase – “world class” pretensions of Johannesburg and its sibling Pretoria, the best culture occurs in places that are removed from the trendiness of gentrification’s death march. For sure, Bra Steve’s economic model for the Freedom Station renders the space a shebeen, in the most revolutionary iteration of a booze spot.

The rainbow’s beautiful children, who have all treated us to sets through the Freedom Station’s wall to ceiling glass windows, know too that the power lies in their hands. That was where I first saw Xaba, working out the phrase “ngisebenzela izingane zami nezingane zezingane zami” (I work for my children and my children’s children). At the Old Fire Station is where its meaning takes shape.

*The New Thing is an ongoing series exploring new spaces for radical culture in South Africa. Read Part I here.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

In July 2016, the Kumasi Polytechnic presented the K-POLY FUFU MAMA, the latest machine promising to ease the labour-heavy preparation of Ghana’s national dish. The selected audience of fufu pounders, connoisseurs and chop bar owners present at the launch covered by TV3 is shown as enthusiastic recipients of this Ghanaian technological breakthrough. The inventors of the machine rehearse the ever-same argument: K-Poly is more hygienic, less burdensome, less noisy and more nature-friendly than the traditional pounding with mortar and pestle. And even more importantly: with K-Poly, fufu is ready in less than five minutes.

However convincing this might sound, chances are that, like its many predecessors promoted since 1975 – the Hobart mixer, the Kenwood mixer, and hammer mills – K-Poly Fufu Mama will not enter Ghanaian households at all. Prices such as US$225 for a comparable yam pounding machine can only be part of the explanation. The sophisticated palates of many fufu eaters insist that one can taste the difference. The sound of two metals rubbing against each other can never match the rhythm of topam-topam or the soft fu-fu, fu-fu sound the air makes when it escapes from the mash in the final stages of pounding. As a result, what is not prepared with mortar and pestle cannot be fufu, and the use of machines is nothing but laziness.

As long as the culinary standard remains this high, there will be competition for the machine. And Ghanaians will keep pounding, with hardening of palms, sweat dripping into the mash and all – the same way as “from time immemorial”, in the words of the Daily Graphic article announcing the new machine.

Without even going as far as the preparation of the soup that comes with it, the creation of a perfectly smooth fufu ball can take anything from the main hours of the afternoon to a couple of days, or, if fermented cassava is being used, a week. At the very least, it involves two people, the pounder standing upright, and the moderator, flipping and turning the mash of plantain, yam or cassava in the mortar in the brief moments after the pestle is lifted and before it is dropped again. In the process, all remaining lumps are meticulously taken out by hand until the ball is so soft that it can be swallowed without chewing.

Fufu is not reserved for special occasions. Before the recent rise in the price of cassava, it could be bought for GH₵1.00 at chop bars in Kumasi, an affordable price for those without the manpower to do their own pounding. More importantly, fufu is not food, it is a culinary choice. It is a passion, both in the intense excitement leading up to the meal, as well as in the enduring and suffering having gone into its preparation. It is a dish standing for the nation’s place in the world.

But maintaining such a high level of culinary sophistication on a national scale comes at a price. If it is not backed by the right kind of imperial machinery it will almost certainly earn you one of the lower ranks on the world’s GDP table. On a geopolitical scale, the World Bank is a powerful ally of those who invent pounding machines. A 2006 World Bank report, Gender, Time Use and Poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, found out that “time poverty” needs to be understood as a new dimension of poverty on the continent, meaning that reproductive/ unproductive/ unpaid/ care/ domestic labour takes up too much time. What they call a culturally determined “household time overhead” is the total of things that need to be done around the house. And in their view it is configured in particularly unproductive ways in Africa. Seen from New York, what is worse is that this type of work is also unevenly distributed among men and women. Their numbers show that African women work 30 per cent more than men – and that is even though most of their activities are not even reflected in the data, because women tend to not consider what they do as “work”. In conclusion: “labour-saving domestic technology relating to food processing is likely to have a greater immediate impact in raising the productivity and reducing the time burdens of many women.”

As Yemisi Aribisala points out elsewhere in this edition, Nigerian women in fact use the labour-intensive work in the kitchen to showcase their strength over men, and they have been doing this very successfully: “Over 70 percent of our immunity to disease is sitting inside our guts at the mercy of the food we eat. SHE has license to spit in his meals or lace them with arsenic. She has him, innards and all.” Against the “gender equalising army orders” calling for the inclusion of women into the capitalist work force, she warns that the kitchen is “being falsely implicated in the diminishment of a woman’s power. This much-needed, loved and utilised room is now outrageously persona non grata.”

Accordingly, for Aribisala the preparation of fufu is a far from the drudgery and waste of time bemoaned by the World Bank. She writes:

“The mortar is the vagina, the pestle the penis… but the pounding of yam into a supple mound is at the woman’s pleasure. She decides pace, force, beginning, end, heat, coolness, yes or no. Being in that room where fires are lit is an apparel of power worn by a woman that money cannot pay for. The room yields its secrets to its owner and not to the paid drudge.”

In “The Truth about Fufu”, published in Kalahari Review, Kofi Akpabli also makes use of the sex analogy to explain why fufu is life for many enthusiasts: “When all is done, the pestle is no longer needed until the next session. Meanwhile, the end product lies in the bosom of the mortar just like a new baby issues from the woman’s womb.”

The time poverty strategy is not the first time the World Bank has intervened in the division of labour in African families to save women from using their time in unproductive ways, that is, in ways that do not necessarily produce products to be sold on the market. Three decades ago, when it identified that too much money was being invested into the African state – the national “household time overhead” – the World Bank put a lot of money into attracting women to work on the plantations for the cash crops economy.

According to Silvia Federici in A Feminist Critique of Marx, the refusal to being recruited to work on the plantation, once again, and the defence of subsistence-oriented agriculture by African women, was in turn identified by the World Bank as the main factor in the crisis of its agricultural development projects. A flood of academic papers on “women’s contribution to development” ensued, turning first into NGO-sponsored “income generating projects” and then into “microcredit lending schemes” – all aiming at integrating women into the system of paid labour.

In this light, fufu pounding is a political tool of resistance against a long tradition of Western philosophising about “taste”, stretching from Plato to Hegel to Hannah Arendt. Marked by a profound disregard for the actual taste of the tongue, it locates taste among the lower regions on the hierarchy of the senses and in opposition to the rational character of genuine, cultured, aesthetic experiences. The view that food is fuel derives from this tradition, and it is a prerequisite for how willingly industrial nations have given into the promise of fast food being just that, fast.

In his writings on labour in Capital, Marx never recognised reproductive work – such as cooking or childcare – as work per se, and instead associated it with the world of nature and instinct, like “a spider weaving a web or a bee building a honeycomb”. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith claimed that not the goodwill of the butcher or the baker provides our daily supper, but the self-interest of all economic agents involved in the process of food production. It should be mentioned that he was still living with his mother at the time. In Arendt’s influential conceptual trinity of labour, work and action, homo laborans works like a machine to meet the basic needs of life, remaining a slave and leaving the freedom to act with others and to affect change as an exclusive privilege of homo politicus. Be it the belief in the economic man or the political man, liberals, Marxists and capitalists all agree that technology will eventually pave the way to a better life, will liberate first men, and then women too, from the “burden of chores” like cooking towards more meaningful work.

Little do they know of the Ghanaian kitchen as a place where communities are created, knowledge transmitted and, perhaps most importantly, where those homines politicus who appear to make all the decisions are subordinates to the absolute power of the one who does the cooking.

According to Kofi Akpabli’s account, fufu pounding underwent several technical innovations over time. The spread of chop bars has, for example, given rise to the specialised profession of “fufu macho-men” operating with giant pestles and mortars. If the pounding is not done by a pounder and a moderator in the classic fashion also known as “Fufu-One-on-One”, it can also be done by a single person who possesses the outstanding psychomotor abilities and the mental balance to do the pounding by herself. This technique is also known as “Automated Fufu Machine”. The so-called “Pestles of Mass Destruction” technique requires a massive mortar and can involve about six people. No moderation is needed in this case.

In the latest survey on work and leisure in the high-income countries forming part of the Organisation of Economic Corporation and Development (OECD), time spent cooking or preparing food is so insignificant that it does not even feature in the statistics. People in Germany, for example, work for an average of 1,478 hours a year and have 7,282 hours of leisure, of which sleep makes up the biggest chunk, with an average of 8 hours and 22 minutes a day. Ninety-seven minutes per day are dedicated to eating.

If this “work-life-balance” is to be maintained, a diet made up of sugar cereals for breakfast, bread, spaghetti and frozen pizza makes sense. It can all be arranged in five to ten minutes. That is if one does not have the money to afford food that is prepared by someone else who does the hard work of operating a restaurant or take-out place.

Apart from the compromised quality of the food, the health hazards posed by sugar, fats, excessive wheat consumption and preservatives have all been linked to diseases ranking from schizophrenia to cancer, autism and ADHD. As a result, “bio” and organic supermarket chains are on the rise in urban centres of the West, selling rye and spelt (instead of wheat), and gluten-free, dairy-free and preservative-free products at premium prices.

As John McMurty wrote in The Cancer State of Capitalism, there is something to be learned from feminist economists working from the vantage point of the “unwaged force of women who are not yet disconnected from the life economy by their work. They serve life not commodity production. They are the hidden underpinning of the world economy and the wage equivalent of their life-serving work is estimated at $16 trillion.”

Women have for some time seen through the false promises of capitalist or Marxist progress. Despite washing machines and dish washers, mixers, blenders and microwaves, nappies still need to be changed, rooms need to be cleaned, the young, weak and old ones need to be taken care of – that is if one does not opt for the robot-option as currently being explored in Japan’s “carebot project”.

Even taken on its own terms, the technological liberation thesis does not hold. The divide between paid and unpaid work, between a mother and a chef, is still very much in existence and jobs are still unevenly distributed and remunerated by a patriarchal system. With every new invention, it also becomes clearer that the technologisation of reproductive work has not eliminated its exploitative elements. Just as we know by now that no time is saved by machines, it remains doubtable whether there has been an actual speeding up of the cooking process in the West. Has it perhaps rather been outsourced from the kitchen to the factory, where the work is still being done in the hidden areas of fully industrialised societies?

The first pasta machines date back to the early 17th century. In the mid-19th century, commercially produced pasta was widely available throughout Italy. Meanwhile, the cultivation of wheat, spanning a period of 10,000 years, undertook a drastic change in the last 50 years. To enhance its resilience on the world market, its genetic make-up has been changed so dramatically that the metabolism of human beings – still much the same as 2,5 million years ago – cannot keep up with the genetically engineered grain.

Moreover, the fermentation process of bread dough that has been part of baking bread for millennia, taking place the night before the baking and reducing the amount of protein to make the bread more easily digestible and tastier, has been cut short since the age of industrialisation. More large-scale bakers, pasta and pizza producers are now using ready-made mixtures and frozen dough, and leading to a sharp decline in taste and a rise in intolerances. It is perhaps needless to add that the pressures placed on the yam or cassava root to change its genetic make-up in order to conform with the norms of the world trade system were not nearly as devastating.

And yet, even in societies that depend almost entirely on the consumption of quick and convenient wheat products, a poetics (in the original sense of “making”) of buttering bread, of fixing a tomato pasta sauce, of cutting up the vegetables of a salad, or decorating the base of a frozen pizza, serves as a reminder that the creative and the productive can never be completely divorced from the process of cooking.

Among the alternative economic models on a global scale – beyond social security and basic income grant schemes that operate on the basis of the same capitalist system – some economists have recently started to advocate for the introduction of a new distribution system based on the actual energy that goes into the production of a product. Only then, they argue, could the myth be dispelled that money is an adequate representation of human energy. Their basic unit of value would be the calorie. Finally, then, a system would be in place that values work according to its difficulty, its hardnesss, its social usefulness, the time or energy invested into a product.

Among the only downsides of such an approach would be that fufu in its current form would probably become unaffordable.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

It was the first day of the road trip from Lagos to Saint-Louis, Senegal. I was journeying to explore the migratory and ownership controversies surrounding the popular West African dish, Jollof rice, as part of the research for my project, Wolof/Jollof. I wanted to get the facts right so as to put an end to the Jollof wars that had Nigerians and Ghanaians constantly at each other’s throats.

The debate on which one of these nations has the best Jollof rice has been trending online for close to five years, if not more. Each country claims ownership. The truth is somewhere in between. Jollof is a pidgin word for the Wolof people of Senegal and the earliest recipes were formulated in Senegal. But even this becomes slippery in a global world. Brazil, for example, has a red rice which looks and almost tastes like Jollof. In Nigeria, the very idea that anyone else makes better Jollof is taboo. It’s become a national dish and inspires fierce emotions that extend beyond the kitchen. Jollof is good feeling. It’s the joy you feel at a wedding when its spicy aroma fills the air. It is that one dish across the country that no one ever objects to. In a country of two hundred ethnic groups, more than one thousand indigenous dishes and more tastes, it suggests unity.

But to understand the roots of its unifying power, I had to cross borders. First, all 20 checkpoints within a 200m span of the infamous Seme border between Lagos and Cotonou. Once this ritual was over, I proceeded to change my currency from Naira to CFA Franc, which is the accepted currency in most francophone African states. This in itself was another ritual as the rates keep fluctuating, not to mention that the money-changers are also very aware! All professed to be honest. I knew I was being cheated blindly but was happy to be on my way. I was put on a commercial motorbike to take me about 20km into Cotonou, where I would get a bus to Bamako in Mali.

I eventually got to the bus park and waited about five hours to get on a bus that was initially billed to leave in about 30 minutes. Luckily, I met a familiar face in the park, Ben Chislet, a photographer from Berlin who had been a part of the just concluded Lagos Photo Festival. He was on his way to see the photo biennale in Bamako, so we decided to ride together since Bamako was along my way. We bonded quickly and shared our fears on the deadly journey that was ahead of us. The best part was that I had someone to take photographs of my quest for Jollof. We were soon to find out that rice came at a price and most of these images had to be stolen. Ben, who was also familiar with the Jollof phenomenon, was keen to see if anything would beat the Lagos Jollof he had become acquainted with. He loaded his bag with biscuits and water; I, on the other hand, was ready to eat whatever came my way, hoping I had a tougher stomach. I was wrong.

31 October 2015

At about a few minutes to midnight, our bus finally left Cotonou. Morning came slowly and our hopes of some respite were dashed as the bus kept going until about 4pm, when we had our very first stop. Deep into the north of Benin Republic, a vast expanse of arid land with tiny pockets of civilisation, we managed to catch some food and fresh air. It was quite surprising that the only two people on the bus complaining about the harsh travel conditions were Ben and I. To crown my frustrations, I hadn’t seen or tasted a grain of Jollof rice since my trip began.

1 November 2015

My first taste of anything close to Jollof rice came right as we got into Burkina Faso. The taste wasn’t anything familiar, but it kept me alive. I was less than impressed with this coloured rice which I later learnt was called malo. More unimpressive was the racket which was run by the border officials. By our summations, they deliberately kept us at the checkpoints so we could buy food from the vendors. This wasn’t the Jollof trip I had in mind, where I was sampling different recipes of Jollof rice from kitchen to kitchen, country to country. My search for Jollof was slowly becoming a nightmare. The bus would stop for hours on end sometimes, due to disputes with custom officers and, at other times, because the drivers needed to pray.

2 November 2015

By this time, I was mentally and physically famished. The bus would stop only once in the mornings for the passengers to freshen up and food could only be purchased when and if it was available at border checks. Ben’s Google maps had gone off radar and we knew we were deep into Burkina Faso, heading north towards Mali.

On one of our stops I caught the smell of roasted meat, which in Nigeria is called suya. The heavy scent came as a breath of fresh air after the biscuits and rice we had been condemned to. Getting closer to the grill, I noticed the severed head of a donkey; this was a sight unseen in Southern Nigeria. Nigerians generally look down on the cuisines of most other African countries. My curious, artistic tongue was ready to take risks, but not donkey. Generally, francophone African countries’ cuisine is highly influenced by French cuisine, and dry bread and cheese never killed anyone, but this was a little too much for my mind. A few minutes to midnight, we finally made our way into the beautiful city of Bamako.

3 November 2015

Finally, I was in my hotel room, lying on the bed after brief introductions to Ben’s colleague who was lodging in the same hotel. We would all have breakfast the next morning and talk about different topics ranging from photography in Africa, to the Bamako Biennale, and, of course, our hectic journey with its biscuits and rice. Breakfast was traditional – French bread, cheese, omelette and coffee. Almost everyone I met in Bamako was shocked that I had travelled by road just to taste Jollof and not to see the biennale

That day, Ben and I visited a couple of roadside restaurants in search of anything that could match Jollof rice. A few variations came close but, ultimately, I knew my quest lay ahead on a little island called Saint-Louis. The Nigerian Jollof I was used to was prepared in chicken or beef broth, the rice here in Bamako was dry, lacking the meaty undercurrent. At around 7pm, I bought a ticket for a bus going to Senegal.

4 November 2015

The food got better as I got closer to Saint-Louis. The yassa poulet (chicken dish) served at the Hotel Ourossogui was good, but at this point all I wanted to do was get to Saint-Louis.

Saint-Louis

I arrived at the former West African capital of the French colonial empire in the wee hours of morning. Saint-Louis is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site. Even in the dark I knew I was in the centre of some utopia – the straight walls and narrow streets were quite an unfamiliar sight to me. Stephan, the director at artists’ residency Waaw (“yes” in Wolof), had come to the streets to wait for me, curious to meet someone who had come all the way from Lagos by road in search of Jollof rice. Our first conversation was warm and short.

I woke up to huge smiles from other artists who were staying at Waaw. By midday, I was introduced to the almighty thiebou dienne, the Senegalese answer (or forefather, if you will) to Nigerian Jollof rice – a combination of rice and fish with a cocktail of vegetables on the side.

From the very first spoon I knew there was something distinctly Jollof about this dish – not the taste, more the feeling. The stark difference between meat in Jollof and fish in thiebou dienne gave each a distinct flavour. The obviously smaller rice grains used in thiebou dienne also did something to the taste buds. But the link was there, as a trace, an after-taste – as if the Jollof itself carried memories of thiebou dienne.

I was told that thiebou (rice) and dienne (fish) was the official Senegalese dish, with other slight variations such as yassa poulet and thiebou yapp (rice and meat). My education on the subject came crashing at me hard and fast. Everyone had something to say about this dish. And it was not just what was said, but how that signalled its almost sacred status. I was soon to discover that thiebou dienne had a dance and a dedicated drumbeat. Through several visits to local cooks and private homes, I learnt first-hand or, rather, by mouth, about the origin of thiebou dienne and its roots in the great Wolof Empire. As the story goes, the original recipe was formulated by Penda Mbaye, a mythical figure who is said to have been a brilliant cook and the mistress to the then French colonial governor. Was it her secret thiebou dienne recipe that seduced him?

My stay in Saint-Louis came to an end with one final test as I cooked a dish of Jollof rice for the other artists at Waaw using my 14-year old recipe. Rooted in a simple time-based Jollof cooking process, it’s a recipe conjured during my undergraduate years, and perfected by endless experimentation and practise. That night was filled with tales of Lagos, Saint-Louis, pints of Gazelle, Castel and Flag beer, and the aroma of Jollof rice.

So, what did my journey yield? Understanding Jollof’s roots did not put an end to the Jollof Wars, but rather fuelled more conversations and arguments. Recently at a World Jollof Rice Day event held in Lagos, I was asked the ever-recurring question: who makes better Jollof rice – Ghana or Nigeria? My answer? Mysteriously, it’s all in the rice, rather than the process.

I cannot get to the taste of Ghanaian Jollof because it is made with perfumed rice, a special type of rice that has the strong fragrance of cologne.

I never got to really test my theory. I was advised not to travel back to Lagos via the West African coast due to the bad roads and Ebola scare, but an earlier road trip to Ghana in 2013 had left me less than impressed. The huge grains and perfumery didn’t bear much promise to my taste buds, but hey, I’m just another Nigerian.

This piece appears in Chronic Books Foods, a supplement to the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

These images are from photographer Adji Dieye’s series titled “Maggic Cube”, based on her research on the influence of advertising on visual culture in Senegal, and, specifically, the omnipresence of stock cube advertisements in Dakar. Her project responds to the words of the late revolutionary, Thomas Sankara: “It’s natural that the person who provides you with food will also dictate their will to you. Look at your plate, when you eat imported rice, corn or millet. That’s what imperialism is.”

To the list of imperialist products, Dieye adds imported stock cubes, a banal product that hides, however, a much darker truth. The most popular, Maggi, was among the first brands exported to Africa after the Berlin Conference in 1885. “The cube became a key element in African cuisines, spread all over the food as a magic potion,” Dieye says, “Not for nothing, stock cubes are called ‘magic’ in popular jargon.”

This photoessay appears in Chronic Books Foods, a supplement to the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

“Second Transition” refers to the phase of liberation struggle in South Africa which began after the 1994 elections. It is also the title of a project by photographer Thabiso Sekgala (1981-2014), to document the ongoing struggle for land ownership and economic freedom in rural South Africa.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

Nearly a decade on from the worst postcolonial turmoil that saw their currency devalued by thousands of percentage points, Zimbabweans have had to brace themselves as the government introduced another face-saving tender. The bond note, pegged at equal value to the US dollar, but not legal outside the country, is traded more often in comic sketch or as the source of derision, than in markets. Fungai Machirori reports from Harare.

A security guard stops me as I exit one of the popular fresh food shops at Harare’s upmarket Avondale shopping centre.

“Sister, you look like someone I can ask this question. Do you have a moment?”

I am confused by the request, but also a little curious. And so I decide to indulge her.

“Do you think these bond notes will take us back to 2008? Do you think God can let us suffer again like that year?”

She apologises for her candour. Such confronting enquiries (in Zimbabwe, at least) would ordinarily be softened by meandering pleasantries and chitchat, but it is the day that bond notes – after many months of speculation – have been released into circulation. And it is probably this that has emboldened her to be forthright in her questioning. In 2008 – a year that most Zimbabweans still associate with the nation’s worst postcolonial social, economic and political turmoil – she tells me she lost family members whose medical costs she could not meet because of the acute cash crisis of that time.

“I buried too many people then and I don’t want the same thing to happen ever again.”

I am not sure what to say, so I tell her what little I know about how the bond notes have been described to work. Through various media supplements and jingles, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) has framed bond notes as a financial measure intended to ease the cash shortages that have seen many Zimbabweans spend whole days and nights in bank queues; sights which had, until last year, remained a spectre of 2008.

A surge in government borrowing, large tranches of misappropriated funds, inhibitive policies for external investment and poor export performance have collectively led to a critical shortage of cash in Zimbabwe’s multicurrency economy which has largely thrived on transactions made in US dollars since 2009. Bond notes are thus proposed as a means to plug this gap.

At the same time, they are intended to serve as a financially-related incentive. Pegged at a rate of 1:1 with the dollar, one of the main schemes associated with the bond notes is a performance-related bonus of five per cent as a way of incentivising large scale exporters, particularly within sectors such as tobacco farming. Also, to encourage diaspora remittances (said to already contribute about ten per cent of the nation’s GDP) through more formal channels, the RBZ has also introduced the Diaspora Remittances Incentives Scheme that is envisaged to reward money transfer agents and recipients of such transfers.

And yet many issues continue to colour the public’s perception of the new tender.

One of the biggest concerns surrounding the introduction of bond notes is the fact that many people do not understand what exactly this new tender is, or how it differs from the discontinued and distrusted Zimbabwe dollar. In the build-up to the issuance of the currency, the RBZ had assured that its introduction would be contingent upon citizens’ satisfactory understanding of its purpose. However, formal notice of the date of introduction of bond notes was only provided to the public two days before the currency entered the market. A bank whose employees leaked the first – and only – public images of the currency the day before its official launch, received a US$500,000 fine from the RBZ, with all involved employees being summarily dismissed.

Although media coverage – through public radio and TV jingles, posters and billboards – has increased over the last few months, this has done little to allay general fears and ensure comprehensive public awareness. Bond notes were further conspicuous by their absence from President Robert Mugabe’s year-end state of the nation address. Uncertainty is exacerbated by some retailers, who have either refused to accept bond notes from customers, or have created dual payment systems with lower prices offered to those able to make cash payments in US dollars.

Another sticking point is the pegging of the currency, only recognised as legal tender within Zimbabwe, at the same rate as the US dollar. Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa stated in the weeks running up to the note’s introduction: “If one owes you money in US dollars, you must accept payment in bond notes. You cannot refuse.” However, in a News Day piece by Zimbabwe’s former finance minister, Tendai Biti, and international policy analyst, Todd Moss, the two opine that since bond notes are not legal tender anywhere outside of Zimbabwe, they cannot logically hold an equal value to the US dollar, a global currency. In essence, they conclude that bond notes are certain to devalue over time, pushing up their exchange rate to the dollar. Such a scenario would inevitably offset further USD shortages and hyperinflationary conditions.

Yet another source of discontent is a lack of clarity about how ordinary citizens will benefit from the issuance of bond notes. Some say they only see the currency favouring large-scale exporters through the export incentive. As a result, there are suspicions that bond notes are not intended to serve the general public’s interests, but rather niche interests and those of the government.

That there is a disconnect between the perceived interests of citizens and the government is telling of a nation that in 2016 broke into atypical public protest, driven in great part by the rise of the #ThisFlag citizens’ movement led by Pastor Evan Mawarire, whose sentiments resonated deeply with many Zimbabwean social media users. Prior to bond notes becoming legal tender, #ThisFlag printed and circulated its own version of the notes – derisively called “bond nots”. Featuring images of provocative figures such as the president and the first lady, Grace Mugabe, among others, the faux currency was intended as a form of protest against the government’s financial mismanagement. The real currency is facetiously referred to as “bondage notes” or “Bob notes”

With such rising frustrations, and the emergence of public humour as a staple of survival, it is no surprise that alternative media genres – in the form of comedy and satire – continue to grow as sources of entertainment and social commentary around the new currency. In a skit produced by the popular Bustop TV, a character known as Comic Pastor stands accused of hoarding the paper used to print bond notes from South Africa. After repeated interrogation, it is found that it is actually reams of bond paper that he is in possession of. In yet another skit, by Magamba TV, bond notes are explained through the analogy of two popular sadza accompaniments, high-end oxtail and the more economical kapenta (Tanganyika sardine), whose equivalent value as relish is brought into humorous question.

For a people who have practised “mattress banking” and watched their savings and salaries devalue to worthless bricks of bank notes before, bond notes elicit all too real feelings of apprehension and angst. Popularised in 2008, “cash burning” – a system of selling US dollars in cash at a premium payable via bank transfer – has returned and the environment for a thriving black market continues to grow. And while a plastic economy, or cashless society, is becoming more evident, this remains a difficult culture to adopt among a people largely distrustful of formal institutions such as banks and the government. Moreover, for those most affected by this cash crisis – making their living through the small scale and/or informal economy – paper cash remains a paramount currency for everyday life.

The night before the bond notes were released, I tweeted my personal corruption of the popular poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas”. I wrote:

‘Twas the night before #bondnotes,

when all through the house,

not a creature was ready, not even a mouse.

#holdsbreath

This was retweeted almost 50 times and responses of uncertainty exchanged. Now, a few months later, there remains general distrust, albeit amid relief that the currency continues to trade (at time of writing) at 1:1 with the US dollar.

I am not sure if any part of my explanation about the bond notes allays the security guard’s fears that Monday evening when we meet. But soon we are both having a laugh, recalling the bizarre events of our lives back in 2008. I tell her of the time I fainted as I stood in line for bread during an intense heat wave. And she reminds me of that difficult winter when basic foodstuffs like salt became luxuries, when airtime cost trillions of dollars. We part on this note, and wish each other well, committing the fate of our nation – with cautious hope – to those beyond our conversation.

Zimbabweans have known the surreal experience of moving through empty grocery aisles, the sight of derelict shelves and freezers at each hopeful turn. They have also known the indignities of buying bread and milk and eggs at illicit vending spots in unsanitary lanes where the drunk and incontinent release their waste.

For now, food remains abundant and high-end shops and shopping complexes continue to make brisk business. Even if most Zimbabweans can’t afford much beyond the basics, it is still a small comfort that on the surface, all remains ordered and calm.

At least for now.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

]]>http://chimurengachronic.co.za/in-bond-we-trust/feed/08694Your Own Hand Sold You: Voluntary servitude in the Francafriquehttp://chimurengachronic.co.za/your-own-hand-sold-you-voluntary-servitude-in-the-francafrique/
http://chimurengachronic.co.za/your-own-hand-sold-you-voluntary-servitude-in-the-francafrique/#respondWed, 24 May 2017 11:07:33 +0000http://chimurengachronic.co.za/?p=8683

In the CFA franc, the French colonial mission in West Africa found a way to ensure a paternalist and pernicious stranglehold on the economies of a vast region of the continent. Critics are vociferous and persistent in decrying its catastrophic effects on the socio-economic development of 150 million people in 15 countries over more than seven decades. French corporations and African elites are the few beneficiaries of CFA-zone machinations. Historically, those who opposed the currency risked alienating the metropole and were on the receiving end of its intransigence and outright violence. Not much has changed, writes Moses Marz, and a significant shift in the mindset of the French bureaucracy is the only likely remedy for monetary servitude in the Francafrique.

On 7 January this year, the Front Anti CFA organised by NGO Urgences Panafricanistes for a demonstration at the Place de l’Obélisque, a plaza commemorating Senegal’s 1960 independence from France. A set of plastic chairs is arranged in a circle. Kémi Séba is standing at the centre, wearing a tightly cut purple boubou with an Africa symbol over the pocket. About 50 people are sitting or standing around him, listening to his rant against the CFA franc, the currency that Charles de Gaulle created in 1945 for the Colonies Françaises d’Afrique, only renaming it into Coopération Financière en Afrique after the wave of formal decolonisations in 1960, but still used in order for France to remain in control of its former colonies. Séba tells his listeners that de Gaulle adopted the CFA from the Nazis’ occupation of France and that during slavery the French also told them that they were better off as slaves, that they would get food every day and that liberation would be too risky. Hulo Guillabert, who is in the audience, responds: “No, we don’t give a shit if it is risky. We don’t want this CFA anymore. If that means we’ll die, we’ll die!” Gaïnde, also in the audience, explains: “If there are only a few of us here today, it is because we are already in the future. We no longer live in the past. We are the thinkers and actors of the avant-garde. We are already sovereign. We are already independent. Now we need to spread this message to get a critical mass.”

For Séba, the founder of Urgences Panafricanistes, it is clear that the struggle against the CFA cannot take place on a national level and needs to move gradually from sensitisations to mobilisation and to a boycott of French products. The franc zone includes a population of 150 million people across eight countries forming part of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo), as well as seven Central African countries forming part of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (Cameroon, DR Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic and Chad) and the Comoros. The demonstrations on 7 January take place simultaneously in Abidjan, Bamako, Bohicon, Bologna, Brussels, Casamance, Dakar, Haiti, Kinshasa, London, Ouagadougou, Ouidah and Paris, a new pan-African map that, for now, mainly exists in online discussions among university students.

On 14 December 2016, Ali Laidi interviews Kako Nubukpo on his France 24 TV-show Intelligence Economique. Since his dismissal as minister in the Togolese government, Nubukpo is a frequent guest at talk shows and round tables on the CFA, promoting his new book Sortir l’Afrique de laservitude monétaire – A qui profite le franc CFA? (Freeing Africa from Monetary Servitude – Who profits from the CFA franc?) When he lists the negative aspects of the currency, one after the other, a disarming smile accompanies what must be a delicate topic for the audience. Preferring to speak of servitude instead of neo-colonialism and diplomatically calling for greater flexibility instead of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”, Nubukpo quickly convinces the moderator of his views. Towards the end of the show, Laidi himself ends up referring to the currency as an “incredible absurdity”.

A year earlier, at the occasion of the 55th anniversary of Chad’s independence in N’Djamena, Idriss Déby, Chad’s president since 1990 and graduate of Qaddhafi’s World Revolutionary Centre, announced unexpectedly that it is time to “cut a string that is preventing Africa from developing”, calling for the creation of a proper African currency that no longer relies on postcolonial mechanisms of domination. At first no one knew what to make of this statement by a Françafrique faithful. Was he trying to threaten French authorities because they did not support his 2016 re-election campaign? Was this connected to his country’s war against Boko Haram? Déby repeated his claims in a Jeune Afrique interview in February 2017, stating that “a revision of the terms of cooperation is absolutely necessary and unavoidable”. His pronouncements hover in the background of the ongoing discussion as a broken taboo, and an indication of the possibility of a change of mind in the current generation of African politicians.

What at first looked like the annual rehearsal of anti-CFA rhetoric has taken another discursive dimension after the currency’s 70th anniversary in 2015. The unlikely confluence of interests between Nubukpo, an economist-turned-academic, Déby, the autocratic ruler of Chad, and Séba, a professional pan Africanist with links to the Nation of Islam, has combined the technical and symbolic anti-CFA arguments to move the debate away from discussions about the possible effects of another devaluation – a concern that preoccupied the debate before – towards a complete abolition of the currency.

Kémi Séba’s anti-CFA project has been more successful than any other of his previous organisations, two of which were disbanded by the French government for anti-Semitism and inciting racial violence. Fashioning himself as a black radical in the line of Malcom X and Cheikh Anta Diop – with books such as Supra-Négritude and Black Nihilism – and having recently changed supremacist views for what he calls ethno-differencialism, Séba moved from France to Senegal to benefit from greater levels of freedom of expression.

Before his contract with the Togolese government, Kako Nubupko worked for the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) for three years before posts at business schools in Lyon, Oxford and Princeton. He has experienced the power and intellectual laziness of bureaucratic routine first hand. He is confident that a change of mentality is taking place – at least in the French administration. His talk about the strategies of the Asian Dragons, the disjuncture between South Korea and Senegal’s monetary policies, and the Millennium Development Goals, at times neatly fits into an African Rising discourse and has pushed the level of attention in French media significantly higher than the academic works of Nicolas Agbohou and Moussa Dembélé, who carried the discursive torch on the CFA franc up to 2014.

Around these figures, a larger conglomeration of politicians, artists, technocrats and activists has gathered across different continents, including people as diametrically opposed as the French right wing politician Marine Le Pen and Mamadou Koulibaly, former Ivorian Finance minister in Laurent Gbagbo’s government.

Currency Can Get You Killed

Historically, going against the CFA franc has come with a high price in Franco-African relations. Sylvanus Olympio, the first president of Togo, was assassinated in 1963 shortly after announcing his intention of creating his own currency. In the hours leading up to his murder, the French and American ambassadors to Togo exchanged phone calls, essentially extraditing him to Gnassingbé Eyadéma and the group of soldiers around him that was demobilised by the French colonial army and wanted a space in the new Togolese army. Eyadéma eventually became president in 1967 and, backed by France, remained in power until his death in 2005. Olympio’s death sentence was pronounced as early as his first meeting with Jacques Foccart, the “shadow man” of France’s Africa policy from Charles de Gaulle to Jacques Chirac. After their talk at the Elysée, Foccart simply said about Olympio: “He is not one of our friends”.

Half a century later, in 2011, the assassination of Muammar Qaddhafi is also, in part, linked to the CFA. The recent Wikileaks of Hillary Clinton’s emails revealed that Nicolas Sarkozy’s motivation for the military intervention in Libya was to prevent Qaddhafi from launching his own pan African currency backed by his reserves of 143 tons of gold and silver, prospectively ridding France of its dominance over francophone Africa. Laurent Gbagbo’s anti CFA stance, since his election campaign of 2000 to the bombing of his residence in 2011, eventually lead to his ICC detention in The Hague – the West’s current preferred means of political elimination of inconvenient African rulers.

In the context of Françafrique, the mafia-like network of French and African elites that grew out of Foccart’s network and still works to maintain France’s geopolitical, military, cultural and institutional dominance in its former colonies, the monetary system of the CFA functions as the cement holding these different spheres together. Although the CFA underwent several adjustments over the last 70 years, its main goal has remained the same: to preserve the value of the currency – by all means necessary.

The tools used for this include, in official economist language, a fixed exchange rate between the CFA franc and the euro set in stone at the equivalent of CFA655.957 to €1; the centralisation of 50 per cent of foreign exchange reserves at the French Treasury, to guarantee “unlimited convertibility” in France; the freedom of transfers within the area and the fixed parity between the two African sub-regions part of the CFA zone. A last unofficial principle holds that the French Central Bank has the veto right in all management decisions by BCEAO, based in Dakar, and the Bank of Central African States (BEAC), based in Yaoundé. The integration of the French franc into the eurozone in 1999 did not affect this arrangement at all. The CFA continues as an enclave in the new system as if nothing happened, like in colonial times when the metropole’s imperative was to import cheap primary resources from the colonies under the auspices of normal economic practice.

Protests against the CFA are not new. They have been around since its inception and resurface on a regular basis. Over the last seven decades, dependency theorists, liberal economists, Marxists and pan Africanists have created a canon of articles and books devoted to the critique of the CFA. Osendé Afana’s L’Economie De L’Ouest-Africain (1966), Pathé Diagne’s Pour l‘unité ouest-africaine (1972) and Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi’s Monnaie, Servitude et Liberte (1980) form part of that tradition. Nubukpo’s Sortir l’Afrique de la servitude monétaire is only the latest contribution forming the analytical background to the current protest.

In these works, the CFA still stands for a lack of sovereignty for the African member states. A state or a federation of states that cannot decide on its own when to raise or lower the value of its currency, to adjust to new developments by changing course, is devoid of any political capacity and has no way of bettering its economic position. It is, for example, a common-place notion that it would benefit Malian or Beninese cotton producers a great deal if the CFA franc were no longer overvalued through its tie to the euro.

In terms of hard socio-economic results, any economist would struggle to disprove the fact that the 15 countries that make up the franc zone are part of the poorest of Africa. In the terms of the UN data of reference for international organisations, seven out of eight UEMOA-countries (West African Economic and Monetary Union) are classified as “least developed countries,” with nine out of 10 people living on the equivalent of US$2 a day. Ivory Coast, the only exception and the largest contributor to BCEAO making up to 40 per cent of its resources, was a “heavily indebted poor country” according to the IMF before Alassane Ouattara, formerly of BCEAO and IMF, and the guardian of Françafrique, became president and received a debt cancellation gift from his former colleagues in New York.

Despite being in existence for seven decades, the CFA franc has done next to nothing for the regional integration of its member countries. The level of imports within the UEMOA (West African Economic and Monetary Union) is less than 15 per cent of their total imports, only four per cent in the case of CEMAC, the Central African equivalent – compared with 60 per cent within the EU zone, for example. This is not surprising since in the logic of extraversion there is no space for horizontal relations. Meanwhile, in terms of legal financial flows, French companies like Bolloré, Total, Societé Générale, BNP-Paribas, Orange and France Télécom get the main state tenders through the well-oiled channels of Françafrique and can operate without the risk of depreciating currency and with easy transfers back home. In terms of illegal financial flows (IFF), the free capital movement that is part of the CFA agreement leaves member countries no power to control the sums being transferred in and out of the country. On the IFF heat map, Ivory Coast is marked in deep red and, even more embarrassingly, BEAC governors were caught by Wikileaks transferring €500 million to the Societé Générale.

Moreover, the fact that the CFA agreement dictates that African countries have to deposit half of their foreign exchange reserves with the French treasury deprives these countries of vital resources to finance their own projects. The part of the interest on this money that France transfers back is declared as development aid. In 2005, it was reported that €72 billion had accumulated as reserves in the French treasury over the last 50 years. The amount equals a coverage rate of 110 per cent – when the agreement only prescribes a rate of 20 per cent.

What makes no economic sense to the CFA-critics is a source of pride for Ouattara, the most fervent defender of the CFA. Repeatedly referring to his credentials as former governor of BCEAO, the Ivorian president proclaimed in 2016: “I can assure you that the CFA has been well-managed by Africans”, citing as the main reason that the zone is one of the few that has a coverage rate of 100 per cent.

Kaku Nubukpo reads in this behaviour by the central banks a voluntary subjugation that can be explained by African rulers’ attempts to cast themselves as “good pupils of monetary orthodoxy” – to create the impression of a credible monetary zone in what is, by financial standards, an absolute catastrophe. The extraordinary high interest rates the African central banks place on credits given to businesses and their decision to prioritise keeping inflation levels low form part of the dogma of the 1980s. By limiting inflation levels to two per cent, the same way the European Central Bank does, the BCEAO follows the simple logic of “what is good for Europe is good for us”, which is particularly absurd given that, in times of crisis, the European Central Bank is the first bank to leave monetarist orthodoxy behind.

While technocrats, importers and urban elites might benefit from the CFA, buying imported products and property that does not lose its value, for the overwhelming number of people living in rural areas it would be better otherwise.

*

The only real public outcry across the CFA franc region came in 1994 when the French government of Edouard Balladur decided unilaterally to cut the value of the CFA in half, following structural adjustment pressures of the IMF and World Bank. The news reached the African heads of state while they were discussing the future of the already financially defunct continental airline, Air Afrique. It was up to Alassane Ouattara, then prime minister in the regime of Félix Houphouet-Boigny, Foccart’s best friend in Africa, to convince all the other presidents to sign off the devaluation. The official announcement by Balladour was that the “CFA franc was devalued in 1994 at the instigation of France, because we felt it was the best way to help these countries in their development”.

What was, politically, an embarrassment for the heads of state and unmasked their neocolonial dependence on France, had even more drastic consequences for the populations of the member states. People were completely unprepared for the devaluation and had their purchasing power effectively cut in half. The devaluation marked the beginning of an ongoing recession and the end of a period up to the mid-1980s in which the franc zone states saw relatively strong levels of economic growth and greater stability than neighbouring countries, Ghana and Nigeria.

Still, although the trauma of 1994 lives on, nothing has changed in the architecture of the currency.

The neat, neoliberal separation of economy, politics, culture and history forms part of the explanation why, with all the counter-arguments in place, the CFA is still around. From the brightly lit France 24 TV studios and the amazingly local sounding RFI Afrique broadcasts, to the weekly covers of the Jeune Afrique magazine carrying the posh image of the powerful big man in a suit, there is a complete world in which a “CFA fort”, a strong currency, appears completely natural and is even a source of pride.

In this world, it also makes sense to depict the contours of France hovering over West and Central Africa like holy spirit, as on the map of the 40th anniversary of the CFA. Or for a 2005 French law to be passed by parliament that reads: “School courses should recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in north Africa.” Or for François Fillon, the current Republican candidate for the French presidential election to declare, on the same subject, that France cannot be sentenced “guilty for wanting to share its culture with the people of Africa”.

Trying to make sense of France’s inability to engage its colonial past and present, academics have reverted to psychoanalytical models to explain what Achille Mbembe calls the “long imperial winter” of France, referring to narcissism, a desire for apartheid, or just that: racism. To keep the marriage with such an abusive partner alive, the franc zone cannot but maintain the practice of servitude volontaire as a kind of masochism that keeps the cooperation alive.

The illusion that money is nothing but a means of exchange, a reflection of the objects that can be bought with it, or a precious metal with an intrinsic value, has been propagated by Euroliberalists who, since the end of the Second World War, want to keep currency debates as far away from politics as possible.

Anthropologists know that money has always functioned much like a semantic system that has historically more to do with appeasing social relations between human beings and the gods, through sacrifice or payments of debt, hence the etymological roots of to pay. Money does more than establish equivalences – it contains violence and its main social function is the construction of the state and a stabilisation of norms of consumption.

The coins and notes of the CFA efface any political reference, other than those to modernity itself. The separation between planes, satellite dishes, trains, @-signs and electromagnetic waves on the obverse part of the notes, and birds, fish, hippopotami and camels on the reverse leave a distance of modern civilisation that needs to be crossed from one part of the bill to the other.

When operating in this logic it also makes sense to accept the explanation given by the Central Bank of France – flanked by representatives of BCEAO and BEAC – in a recent press conference to the question why CFA franc notes, which are after all printed in France, cannot be exchanged in France. To avoid the threats of financial terrorism and the circulation of false money, it has opted to only accept modern means of financial transactions – in other words, electronic transfers to France. At last, the number itself has out-ruled all other symbols. And who wouldn’t want to be modern?

*

There is no agreement on a way forward among the activists and economists of the Front Anti CFA. There is no evidence that opting either for single currencies or other regional ones will, in any way, be better. What is clear, however, is that lack of political will has hindered projects such as the common ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) currency, lying dormant since 2005, or a similar project by the East African Community started in 2010. The way Germany dealt with Greece in proper colonial terms – accusing it of collective laziness and unreliability – in the recent crisis is a prominent example for demonstrating that a currency needs a union of solidarity across individual national markets.

So, if a natural disaster does not strike, it looks like, again, only change among the French bureaucrats is going to bring about a change in the CFA zone. France has for a long time been good at downplaying the benefits it draws from retaining its colonial ties. Chances are that, behind the curtain, the administrators are no longer sure whether it makes sense to keep the zone in place once a wider audience finds out what happens in its African pré-carré. Its main trade partners in Africa are Angola, Nigeria and South Africa. And they are using their own currencies in any case. A sign in that direction was that, for the first time since the time of decolonisation, and in the immediate aftermath of the wave of Front Anti CFA protests, the French foreign ministry issued a questionnaire to the African students of the Paris Institute of Political Science, the reproductive machine of the French political elite, to ask them what they think about the CFA.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

To purchase in print or as a PDF head to our online shop,or get copies from your nearest dealer.

I have debated about writing this for days, in case it has a negative effect on my ability to freely do the things I like doing, like eating fish in the open air pubs at Mulungu Beach in Munyonyo, devouring pork with friends in the roadside cafes in Wandegeya, or having cold ones in backstreet Kabalagala. I have always found a reason, if not an excuse, to travel to Kampala, which is much closer to my home village in Teso than to Nairobi, my country’s capital.

For me, Uganda has always held a deeply sentimental value. Growing up in Busia, at the Kenya-Uganda border, my childhood friends and I knew that everything fancier was always on the Ugandan side of the border. Our fathers went to drink there, bringing back stories that remain alive to this day. All the delicacies we enjoyed – the fish, the roast bananas, the goat meat, nearly always originated from Uganda, and every Saturday morning my friends and I wandered outside Ugandan warehouses in search of the nylon paper and manila strands we used to sew our soccer balls. As a child, I entered Uganda as I would a neighbour’s house. In fact, a good number of my primary school classmates crossed back into Uganda for lunch at home, returning to Kenya to attend their afternoon classes.

Sofia, on the Ugandan side of the border, remains an all time favourite destination for food and drinks. I have never understood, or cared to investigate, how my favourite Kenyan beer, Tusker, retails at one-third of the price I pay for it in Nairobi. Culturally, as an Itesot, my king’s throne is situated in Uganda. I was once filled with cultural pride on seeing a huge billboard advertisement in Kampala by telecommunications giant Orange simply saying “Yoga”, translating the company’s “Hello” tagline into Iteso. Seeing such in Nairobi, where I am almost always the first Iteso my friends have met, would be a pipe dream. To take it further, my maternal great grandmother, Marisiano, has her roots in Uganda, and as an idealistic student activist, just graduated and on the run, your government granted me political asylum.

As you can see, Uganda is more than a second home to me. I hope my writing this will not jeopardise that in any way.

A few days before her arrest in Kampala, Uganda, I sent Dr. Stella Nyanzi a Facebook message of solidarity. She had had run-ins with your government, for what was seen as her indecent attacks on Facebook on your person and the person of the First Lady, Janet Museveni. As someone who has faced personal political upheavals before, I quickly understood the weight of the circumstances Dr. Nyanzi was looking at, and decided to quietly reach out so that she wouldn’t think my silence persisting.

Facebook is where I sent my message of condolence to Dr. Nyanzi on the passing of her father, whom she heavily mourned, on Facebook. Facebook is where I have known of her closeness to her three children. Facebook is where she has teased, cajoled, persuaded and protested. Facebook is where she has celebrated Luganda culture, helping me understand the meaning of Nalongo, as a mother of twins, a name which until then I only associated with Nalongo’s, the most popular pub in Sofia. Importantly, Facebook is where I first got in touch with her for an interview for “Facing the Mediterranean”, a three-part series I wrote on Ugandans in Kenya seeking refuge because of fear of persecution based on their sexual orientation.

To Dr. Nyanzi, Facebook is more than a platform of attack. It is a space she inhabits, a channel for communication, a diary, maybe even a confidant. It must also be a political comrade, with whom she shares and expresses her joys and frustrations. The first time I met her at her office at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), Dr. Nyanzi warned me that she curses a lot. “Be warned,” she said, “I use curse words a lot.” The fact that I was recording the interview didn’t deter her. Indeed, she cursed a lot, possibly because the subject was emotionally heavy and close to her heart.

I had been apprehensive about meeting Dr. Nyanzi, thinking she was a stand-offish academic who had no time for my journalistic pestering. But to my surprise, the moment we shook hands and started talking, I realised she was the direct opposite of what I had imagined her to be – a no-nonsense activist and researcher. She asked me to tell her about myself, and all she took away was that I had been a hothead during my university days, and she oscillated between teasing and complementing my younger self. She was generous with her time, in her lower ground floor office, which she told me could be bugged, but she really didn’t care. We spoke for nearly two hours, and she didn’t censor herself one bit. It is an afternoon I will not forget.

In the end, Dr. Nyanzi asked me how safe I thought I was moving around investigating the story. I told her I believed I was relatively safe, because in my view, I was merely a journalist reporting on an urgent story that had gone unattended. She told me not to take things for granted, asking me to make sure I backed up all my interviews. She then gave me her phone number, asking me to only call her if I needed bail. I laughed at this but knew exactly what she meant.

Not long after, my story was nominated for the 2016 CNN Multichoice African Journalist of the Year Awards. At the awards ceremony in Johannesburg, South Africa, my name was called out as one of the two finalists in the Features category. The bit of the story that had been selected by the organizers to display on the huge screen on stage was part of my conversation with Dr. Nyanzi.

Why the passage was picked I have no idea, but it showed how Dr. Nyanzi was not only a leading social scientist, but also a human being who sympathised with the condition of other human beings, the Ugandan refugees and asylum seekers in Kenya, who referred to her as “Mama Stella”. After the event, a senior Kenyan journalist approached me and asked, “You mean you’ve interviewed Dr. Nyanzi? I follow her on Facebook.”

Mr. President, yours is an exceptional country, with exceptional individuals. Dr. Stella Nyanzi is one of those. I have read of the difficult circumstances you and your comrades encountered in seeking regime change in Uganda in the early 1980s, how you fought in the bush whileyour wife and children were exiled in Sweden. I suspect you all must have had a sadness about being apart. I believe Dr. Nyanzi and her children are currently facing the same predicament.

I know Dr. Nyanzi will reprimand me for pleading her case, and say that she doesn’t need your mercy or sympathy or that of anyone in your family or regime. But I am willing to take her reprimand, in that very fruity language that you and many others should know by now. She will especially heavily reprimand me for pleading the case incorrectly, using humanitarian grounds as opposed to defending her rights as a Ugandan and an intellectual. I am willing to take that reprimand too, again, in her very fruity language, if my plea will see the end to her incarceration.

Mr. President, please let Dr. Nyanzi go back to her work and her children. That is not to say that she will be silent, because it is in her nature to speak up. We read a lot about your days as a young Marxist idealist at the University of Dar es Salaam. You were part of a generation of African intellectuals, some militant, as you yourself turned out to be, who believed in charting a new course for the continent, a monumental task at the time.

If the hand of time was to go back, Mr. President, you’d understand the need for critiquing a regime and its policies. Yours was an even more potent need; that of urgently seeking regime change either through the ballot or the bullet. I cannot help but see echoes of this young idealist in Dr. Nyanzi, only that hers is not a pursuit for political power, but for the basic rights of fellow citizens. She has not deployed bullets. Only words. I implore that you set her free, Mr. President, for she does not deserve to be separated from her family.

I write from a place of complete obscurity, hoping my words, too, will catch the king’s ear.

In Seeing, Jose Saramago’s novel about the death of democracy, citizens in the capital city of an unnamed country calmly disengage from the ritual of elections, in which they have lost faith. The state retaliates by sealing off the city and withdrawing all public services, and in response residents organise themselves to sustain order in the absence of government systems. Garbage is collected. Peace is maintained. Life goes on. This worsens the government’s distress, as it presents them with an even deeper existential threat: redundancy.

Saramago’s prophetic tale came to mind when I started following the response of Ugandan academic Dr. Stella Nyanzi to the government’s failure to provide sanitary pads to schoolgirls who cannot afford them. Incensed by the government’s claim that they lacked money to fulfil their election campaign promise, Nyanzi launched a crowdfunded campaign of her own, Pads4GirlsUg, which elicited a strong show of support from the public. In just a few weeks, the campaign raised thousands of dollars and distributed pads to over 2 000 schoolgirls across four districts.

Inevitably, the state was sidelined from this impressive display of active citizenship, which cast it as both unreliable and redundant when it comes to sanitary health for Uganda’s schoolgirls. “Ugandans have moved away from, ‘we beg the government to help us’,” Nyanzi declared in an interview with Ugandan weekly The Observer. “They say that if the government is impotent, let’s be our own men and impregnate our own women”.

Nyanzi, who is known for deploying vivid sexual metaphors as a tool to invoke outrage over injustice, also used her widely-followed Facebook page to deliver scathing commentary targeting President Yoweri Museveni and first lady, Janet Museveni, who is also the Minister of Education and Sports. On 7 April, Nyanzi was arrested and charged with cyber harassment, for posting “a suggestion or proposal referring to his Excellency Yoweri Kaguta Museveni as among others ‘a pair of buttocks’ which suggestion/proposal is obscene or indecent.”

In other words, Nyanzi was arrested, and has now spent almost three weeks in jail without a bail hearing, for being rude. Her type of activism, while unique in contemporary Ugandan politics – Charles Onyango Obbo has describedher as “our first neck-on-the-chopping-block female social media combatant” – is not entirely new to Uganda’s political landscape. Several days before her arrest, Nyanzi posted a paperby historian Carol Summers titled, Radical Rudeness: Ugandan Social Critiques in the 1940s, challenging her followers to “know our rich history before you think I am the first fighter with words”.

This paper, which has done the rounds since her arrest, is centered on the most famous RSVP in Ugandan history, activist Ssemakula Mulumba’s 18-page rejection of the Bishop of Uganda’s invitation to dinner in 1948. Summers dives into historical records that illustrate how radical activists of the time used rudeness strategically, to provoke the colonial government and citizens alike into a naked confrontation of oppression that was blunted by the emphasis on good manners in politics. This emphasis was central to Britain’s rule in Uganda, allowing it to brush past conflicts in the name of civility: as the Bishop had written to Mulumba, “there is no reason that we should not be on friendly terms, even if you dislike me officially”.

Mulumba, repulsed, rejected the Bishop’s invitation on account of the “foul activities” of the British in Uganda, whom he accused of turning his country into “a pigsty for white swine”. His letter, although addressed to the Bishop, was also intended for the general public. In the analog equivalent of a viral digital post, copies were printed and distributed in Uganda by his comrades. When the British objected to his rudeness, Mulumba unleashed even more vitriol, accusing the Bishop of “disdainful filth” and defiantly asserting that “I know, the [first] letter was spicy, because I took time and care to season it well for you…”

Due to their extremism, Summers writes, these radical activists were sometimes painted as insane — much as the state has now sought to use the Mental Treatment Act against Nyanzi, which lawyer Tricia Twasiima describes as “a colonial law formerly reserved for Africans who demanded for freedom”. But from the perspective of Mulumba and his colleagues, the real insanity lay in oppressive British rule, which sought to both slap their face and shake their hand in one motion. A similar perspective has been raised by many of Nyanzi’s supporters in Uganda today, where her activism channels broader frustrations around chronic problems with public sector services.

In The Observer, Dr. Jimmy Spire Ssentongo marvels that “Our leaders ironically fail to understand our madness, much of which is their making! Such is the bizarre structure of our society that although many of us are insane, the calamitous madness of the powerful always finds exemption while that of the powerless is condemned.” Atuki Turner comments in The Monitor that the real vulgarity does not lie in Nyanzi’s use of language, but in “the situation of the hundreds of girls who have been shamed, teased, ridiculed, laughed at, until they’ve cowered with embarrassment or run out of class in tears, or stayed at home in shame, because of their menstrual periods”.

It is disingenuous to demand respectability in citizens’ responses to a politics that is not respectable. But this principle, however intuitive, is at odds with the popularised understanding of active citizenship, which has been rooted in the vague pursuit of “a seat at the table”. Nyanzi is in prison because, like the citizens of Saramago’s fictional city, she chose instead to construct another table with and for the people, while exposing the vulgarities of the high table in the harshest possible light. Like Mulumba, she was not interested in an easy dinner, but rather in disrupting the enforced respectability in oppression. This is a different kind of active citizenship, and perhaps the most effective kind, when dealing with states that are not responsive to the needs of their people.

Pads4GirlsUg continued to publicise their work in the days leading up to Nyanzi’s second court appearance, while other citizens announced their plans to collect sanitary pad donations at an upcoming music festival. But as Nyanzi and her lawyers sat in the high court on 26 April, with journalists and the general public banned from observing court proceedings, the Minister of Education declared her intent to look into non-governmental organisations that independently distribute pads to schools — adding skeptically, “if they are there”.

Student movements in many African countries have historically confronted contradictions of colonial and post-colonial rule. In Kenya, these movements sent generations of young people into the streets, underground, into exile or death. Isaac Otidi Amuke retraces heady years of involvement in student politics, and the rise and fall of arguably the most renowned activist at the University of Nairobi.

“Do not take part in student politics.” This was a piece of advice given to every Kenyan freshman by family members before reporting to university. If, like most of us, you came from a not so well-to-do economic background, you were reminded that, should one be kicked out for engaging in activism, only the children of the rich had alternatives, like being shipped overseas to complete their studies. Under no circumstances were we, the sons and daughters of peasants, to partake in troublemaking. We were to remember where we came from, the suffering we had left behind. We were not at the university for our own sakes but for the sakes of many others. This narrative was well perfected, and was repeated over and over.

In my case, I had once tried engaging my father in conversation about Tito Adungosi, a former president of the Students Organisation of Nairobi University (SONU), who had been jailed after the 1982 attempted coup d’etat by a section of disgruntled Kenya Air Force privates. He had died in 1988, a few days before his rumoured release date. Adungosi, an Iteso like me from a little-known corner of Kenya, was the closest I got to visualising University of Nairobi radicals at whose feet I worshipped since I was a kid. My father told me Tito had been trouble, a lot of trouble. But he didn’t know why I was asking. A few years later, my brother’s boss, an engineer, who had been at the university with Adungosi, warned me against doing student politics, telling me that Adungosi was a fine orator, but would have done better to liberate his mother’s homestead from grass thatched houses before he opened his mouth to speak. Children of the poor need not speak truth to power. Adungosi died in prison. His mother couldn’t transport his body to his village in Teso because of the stigma surrounding his death, and the fear of repercussions from a paranoid state. Adungosi’s case remained the perfect cautionary tale for freshmen: stay out of student politics or you’ll simply cause your mother untold pain and suffering.

I joined the University of Nairobi reluctantly in November 2004. I had been convinced that I didn’t need a university education, and had settled into a life of hustling, selling high-end jewellery from dubious sources to clients sourced by my friend Cee, who had attended almost half the private schools in Nairobi, and who knew who had money to throw around. With Cee, nothing was too expensive to sell and no price was too high to quote.

My dreams of walking the grounds of the University of Nairobi, where Adungosi and his ilk had made their names, quickly waned after high school. All I wanted was loose cash in my pocket for the weekend night out. Going to university didn’t make sense to me. I passed by the campus on registration day, when my fellow freshmen were queuing to pay fees, and I felt I didn’t belong there. I was wearing jeans, Converse Chuck Taylors and a T-Shirt, hovering around like a drug peddler. Despite thinking I had a real chance of hitting it big with my dubious business pursuits, I knew I had to enrol for my mother, though, to do it for where I came from. Two months later I became a university student.

Christopher Owiro aka Karl Marx in conversation with students at the University of Nairobi, circa 1996

Every Friday and Saturday night, my new friend Tito and I would lead a bunch of friends to a network of nightspots where I was known by the bouncers from previous partying escapades. This allowed me to sneak anyone in, even if they were underaged. Tito, the smooth operator, always had a load of women friends calling us on Friday and Saturday evenings, asking us where the party would be. Tito would get the crew, I would come up with the plan. The partying made campus life bearable.

I wouldn’t stay in school unless I had reason to, and only showed up to do my class presentations in front of lecturers who didn’t know me. I’d then wait for my exams to come, borrow notes and stay up through the night rushing through them. One of my classmates coined me “Student in Diaspora”, since I made strictly technical appearances. Later on, around my third year of study, school became a bother to me, and I considered dropping out more than once. I gave up campus accommodation after first year, seeing that even when I had a hostel room, I hardly spent nights there. Tito would spare one side of his wardrobe for me, telling me that in his room I had a home on campus. Without Tito, I would have dropped out.

Then Oulu GPO (John Paul Oulu) arrived on the scene and life changed dramatically. Oulu GPO was a former vice chairman of SONU. Alongside the Law Society of Kenya, SONU was one of the few robust pro–democracy groups, whose leaders were detained without trial or forced into exile from the 1970s to the1990s. As the historically preeminent student organisation in Kenya, anyone who rose to its leadership was almost always seen as a public figure-in-waiting. During his tenure, Oulu led myriad student protests against fee increases and in favour of equipping the university’s campuses with ambulances, and allowing students to cook in their hostel rooms. He was eventually suspended for his political activism, but despite being persona non-grata, he would sneak in some nights to crash in his girlfriend’s campus room. Whenever he was around, there would be commotion in the corridors, for he had a cult-like following.

Despite my political awareness from an early age, my Damascene conversion to student politics happened when I fell into close contact with an incumbent SONU secretary general, who was consulting me over a project he was working on. That proximity to power demystified things for me. I realised all I needed was more belief in myself, since there I was, feeding ideas to those leading the guild, ordinary ideas which they found profound. There and then I decided I could do it myself, on my own, without playing second fiddle to anyone. When Oulu was readmitted, I was in my third year, running for secretary general of SONU and trying to follow in Adungosi’s footsteps.

I was invited to be part of the welcoming committee for Oulu’s re-admission. A room was set on the sixth floor of Kimberly hostel, where we sat around a table waiting for Oulu, like disciples of Jesus during the last supper, or as if he were Nelson Mandela being released from Robben Island. He arrived, explaining that he had been readmitted under a barrage of unfair, illegal restrictions, including a ban on involvement in politics and meeting with more than five students at a time. It was clear the university administration was targeting the man. I promised to join him in resisting the sanctions. That night, our lifelong friendship began and I made my impromptu entry into underground student politics. Eighteen months later, I was embroiled in a fight with the office of the vice chancellor, threatening to drop out in protest over the administration’s efforts to frustrate student union reform. Oulu and everyone else thought I was crazy to abandon my studies. The vice chancellor was apparently moved and sent two emissaries to buy me dinner.

The main emissary was the university’s chief security officer, a greying, bespectacled man who told me: “You are still a handsome young man. Anyone can give you a job if you walk into their office. Don’t make them use you like Karl Marx… dump you and leave you with nowhere to go.” Karl Marx was in fact Christopher Owiro, a legendary student activist in the late 1990s. It was said by some that he had been used by political forces as a henchman, to cause havoc both within and outside the university. My act of protest was seen in a similar light. Although I wasn’t being used by anyone to cause trouble the Karl Marx analogy hit home.

During my years of underground activism, I would move around alone late at night, either coming from a meeting at a friend’s room or from having a group coffee at the student centre. I never lived on campus, fearing for my security. I couldn’t date or sustain a relationship at the time because of the emotional baggage I carried, trying to balance student activism and the allure of a care-free life outside campus. The pressure and risks were ever present, whether we were distributing subversive materials, being followed by state security agents, or being denied access to campus. On those late nights I almost always bumped into Karl Marx, drunk and staggering back to campus where he’d been living for close to a decade. I would see myself in him, tell myself that if the activism I was engaged in ended up putting me in a fix, then this was exactly how I’d turn out. There was a real possibility of this being me in the not too distant future.

*****

Karl Marx’s last public engagement was on the evening of Thursday, 5 March 2009.

A group of University of Nairobi students witnessed the execution of two men riding in a white Mercedes Benz. The students had chanced on the killings on State House Road while walking back to their hostels. One of the students, assuming that the two, shot at point blank range, were dangerous criminals, asked the shooters, already in flight, why they weren’t taking the men’s bodies off the scene. The usual police ritual is to throw the bodies into a truck and dump them at Nairobi’s public morgue. The shooters, dressed in identical suits, looked like members of an elite death squad. One of them replied that “others” would do the cleaning up.

As the shooters fled the scene, it became clear that the man in the passenger seat of the Mercedes Benz wasn’t dead. The students pulled him from the vehicle, intending to rush him to the main student sanatorium nearby. They had moved only a few yards before he succumbed. They laid him on the tarmac, face to the sky.

I found Oulu GPO lying in the same spot forty minutes later. Karl Marx arrived after nightfall, drunk.

Karl Marx – as he was commonly known; for many didn’t know his real name – had joined the University of Nairobi in September 1996 to pursue a BSc degree, majoring in mathematics. However, that fateful 2009 night, 13 years later, he was still residing at the university. His love-hate relationship with the institution and the state persisted from the late 1990s. That night was yet another where he’d take on both the state and university.

“They are finishing us! They are finishing us! They are finishing us!” Karl Marx cried out on seeing Oulu’s bullet-ridden body lying on the tarmac. “They have killed GPO!”

As he yelled and cried, chants of “Comrade Power”, the student’s rallying call, were heard in the background. Amid his tears, Karl Marx told the students that they had to protest, that Oulu was a comrade. Before the police could get their act together, students took charge of the scene. They pushed the Mercedes Benz into Lower State House, down the entrance to one of the hostels. They pulled the driver’s bullet-ridden body out of the car, carried it a few yards from the vehicle and hid it under the staircase. Hot in pursuit of the students and the body, a reinforced police force charged into Lower State House, dodging stones and other crude missiles deployed by the students. During the confrontation, a first-year student, Eric Ogeto, was shot dead. This further fuelled the student’s anger. Karl Marx and his brigade now had new impetus and they wouldn’t relent.

As the night progressed, Karl Marx removed his shirt and held it in his hand, running up and down in the battle against the riot police. Eventually, the students were overpowered and the body retrieved. There were more protests in the coming week. Shops were looted and property vandalised, but students claimed the state had hired goons to infiltrate and cause havoc to make them look bad. In the end, students retreated to their lecture halls. Karl Marx, dejected, retreated to his drinking.

****

There were many who knew Karl Marx through years of uprisings and political shifts in Kenya. Clarice Atieno, of the class of 2000 at the University of Nairobi, knew him from high school days at Kisumu Boys, where he was coined Karl Marx for his radical politics. They were also classmates at the university when a friend of Atieno’s was found murdered and badly mutilated. Karl Marx immediately rose up and led a student demonstration over his classmate’s death. The university was closed in a matter of hours.

Paul Nyaguti’s first encounter with Karl Marx was almost violent. He was a first year student and had heard that one of his classmates had been arrested. Nyaguti gathered fellow first years and led a protest march to Central Police Station, securing his colleague’s release. On hearing of this act of defiance, Karl Marx walked into Nyaguti’s room and introduced himself as Karl Marx. Nyaguti was unmoved, indifferent almost and Karl Marx was irritated, asking those accompanying him to discipline the errant Nyaguti. Violence was averted only by another group of friends who arrived on the scene.

Their second encounter was less dramatic. Moses Oburu, a senior student leading efforts to reinstate the then banned SONU, heard of Nyaguti leading first years to Central Police Station and approached Nyaguti to join in the fight to have SONU reinstated. They needed courageous people onboard. Oburu gave him posters to pin up across the university, agitating for the reinstatement of SONU. Nyaguti naively went about putting up the posters, ignorant of the fact that such an act was prohibited. In the process, he got to work with Karl Marx, who was also involved in Oburu’s campaign. The two became friends this time round.

Oburu was the person who probably knew Karl Marx best, politically. He was in third year when he met Karl Marx and was instantly impressed by the young man’s revolutionary rhetoric. Soon Oburu, Karl Marx and a couple of other students were organising on campus. Oburu acted as the interim chairman of the SONU Revival Committee. Karl Marx was in charge of mobilisation, liaison, as well as document preparation. According to Oburu, Karl Marx was extremely intelligent and articulate. He was usually the person dispatched to spread word to the students. The group agreed that as a strategy, Oburu would never meet the vice chancellor. He would remain distant, but Karl Marx and the rest of the team would engage the university in negotiations to have SONU reinstated. They found allies in almost all tertiary institutions in Kenya, and built alliances with the student movements at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda and Dar es Salaam University in Tanzania.

Around that time, Hillary Clinton came to Uganda with her husband on an official visit and was hosted by Makerere University’s student guild. The guild president invited Oburu to a meeting with the first lady. Karl Marx and James Nduko, another of their cadres, prepared a dossier for Oburu, complete with newspaper cuttings, documenting human rights abuses committed by the state under then president Daniel Arap Moi. Their main argument was that the parliamentary opposition had failed Kenyans in keeping the government in check, and that only the revival of SONU would keep the state accountable and on its toes. Oburu slipped the dossier to Hillary. On perusing it and listening to their case, Hillary was sympathetic. She promised to get back to them. Not long thereafter, Oburu learnt that President Moi was seeking an urgent meeting with him to discuss the revival of SONU. Oburu declined.

To Oburu’s surprise, Karl Marx had already made contact with Moi and his people through Paul Nyaguti. They agreed that Oburu would not meet President Moi during the negotiations. Karl Marx and the rest of the team would. But Moi insisted that he wanted to meet Oburu. His people scheduled a meeting, but on the day, Oburu didn’t show up. He sent Karl Marx as his representative, accompanied by a couple of other members of the team. Moi refused to speak much and told them he wanted to speak to Oburu. No more intermediaries.

Oburu relented following pressure from Karl Marx. The day came and the group went to State House. Oburu said little. Karl Marx was a brilliant negotiator and enjoyed significant credibility among students. Oburu decided that he would be their spokesman, telling Moi that what Karl Marx said was the official position they had all agreed on. After several meetings of intense negotiation during which Karl Marx gave “immeasurable input”, Moi agreed to reinstate SONU. In the presence of the student negotiators, Moi instructed the vice chancellor, the attorney general and the commissioner of police, respectively, to reinstate SONU and refrain from infiltrating or harassing the student community on campus.

“That is how we brought back SONU, in 1998,” Oburu remembers, “Without Karl Marx the negotiations would have failed.”

Oburu was elected SONU chairman unopposed. He asked Karl Marx to contest a lower seat because most candidates popular with students and likely to win seats were from their Luo ethnic group. Oburu didn’t want it to appear like SONU was going to be a Luo affair. He actively lobbied to engage students from the Kikuyu campus. One was Kariari wa Kariari, who Oburu proposed run for the seat of SONU vice-chairman. Karl Marx did not heed Oburu’s advice and ran for the seat himself. Without Oburu’s support, however, he lost, and took it personally. In attempts to mend fences, Oburu made Karl Marx his right-hand man once he got into office and the latter travelled to many conferences as the de facto SONU spokesman and strategist. Despite being unelected, Karl Marx became one of the most influential individuals in the student movement.

But all was not well with Karl Marx. Despite his reputation and credibility within the movement, he had real trouble with alcohol. Nyaguti recalled that Karl Marx started smoking and drinking heavily in second year, after meeting Kamlesh Pattni. Pattni, in his 20s, was the architect of Kenya’s biggest financial scandal of the 1990s, Goldenberg, in which the country lost millions of dollars through a fraudulent export compensation scheme. Pattni weathered the storm and made an entry into electoral politics. He’d need contacts within the student movement and no one was better placed to guide him than Karl Marx. It seems then that Karl Marx suddenly had more money than he knew what to do with. Nyaguti also suggested that Karl Marx was worn down by the pressures of student activism, particularly in the early days when he was suspended from his studies for two years (despite being off-session at the time), and consistently and unfairly targeted by the administration and authorities.

Karl Marx’s drinking and activism were not a good mix. He was a brilliant mathematician, a strong political orator and negotiator, a radical personality and a drunk. Isaiah Owiro, his first cousin, was brother and guardian rolled into one. “I am the one the police used to call whenever Karl Marx was arrested,” he says. “Sometimes he would get arrested, and the police… would come to my place of work. Whenever I was told policemen were looking for me at work, I always knew it had something to do with Karl Marx. There were a lot of such occasions.”

On one such occasion, Karl Marx decided to go on a hunger strike, refusing to eat prison food. He was moved to Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. Isaiah followed him there and made sure he was released. He recalls the times Karl Marx called the then Ugenya MP James Orengo, who would make interventions to have him released. Westlands MP Fred Gumo also intervened on his behalf numerous times. On another occasion, when he appeared in court at Kibera, University of Nairobi students came in two buses to secure his release. Isaiah suspects the magistrate got intimidated, granting Karl Marx an acquittal.

Such run-ins with the state were dealt with as they came, Isaiah remembers. But in one incident, things almost got out of hand. Karl Marx worked closely with James Orengo in Muungano wa Mageuzi (Movement for Change). According to Isaiah, Raila Odinga’s people swore that if they came across Karl Marx, they would skin him alive, because of his reputation for trying to mount opposition to Odinga. The threat to his life was real. One day they went to watch a Gor Mahia match together. When Odinga supporters saw Karl Marx, they began shouting at him and threatening violence. Isaiah stood up as Karl Marx’s human shield, telling the Odinga supporters that if any of them wanted trouble then all they had to do was lay a finger on Karl Marx. He told them Karl Marx was his younger brother. Apparently, Isaiah had a lot of credibility among this particular group. He had been a rough neck during his days in the streets with some of them. None dared step forward. However, Karl Marx’s security was never guaranteed when he was alone. He couldn’t even walk across town to take a matatu home. He knew these people were looking for him.

Upon graduating with a BSc in mathematics, Karl Marx was struggling deeply with alcoholism. He found it hard to secure or keep jobs. Isaiah tried to help, paying his rent when he couldn’t manage himself. But Karl Marx found it hard to stay in one place for long. Landlords would decline his money, saying he became uncontrollable when drunk and didn’t care whose path he crossed. He resorted to drinking in dingy backstreet bars in downtown Nairobi, from where he’d march in the middle of the street, late at night, singing, making his way back to the University of Nairobi, where he stayed for the most part. If he didn’t have his own accommodation, he’d show up at friends, who would have no choice but to house him for the night.

Whether it was from bar brawls or wounds inflicted during student protests, Karl Marx’s face was covered in scars. He was a shadow of his former self and some couldn’t believe that he was the same man of late-1990s fame. One attempt at his rehabilitation was led by a University of Nairobi professor, who, aware of Karl Marx’s mathematical prowess, organised him a scholarship to study for a second degree, a BSc in actuarial science, in hopes this would offer relief. Others, including President Moi himself offered to help if Karl Marx would stop drinking. According to some, James Orengo, while Minister for Lands, had tried to secure him a government job.

Karl Marx hung around the University of Nairobi campus for more than a decade after his contemporaries graduated. He engaged with latter day student leaders, including Iddi Pembere, of the class of 2010 and SONU’s secretary for health, catering and accommodation. On one occasion, Karl Marx approached Pembere at the student centre bar and restaurant: “I hear you are the one in charge of food. I am hungry. I want to eat and I don’t want to know how that will happen.”

Karl Marx went on to say it was not only him that was hungry. He demanded that anyone seated in adjacent tables at the cafeteria also needed to have a free meal. Iddi was lost for words, but decided to act and see to it that Karl Marx and all those he had pulled in had a meal.

“That’s how much respect I had for Karl Marx,” Iddi says. He knew Karl Marx to be somebody who had done a lot for students at the university, and felt that the least he could do was satisfy the few demands Karl Marx placed on him.

***

On New Year’s Day in 2013, news reached Nairobi that Karl Marx was dead. His body was found inside a barely habitable structure in his father’s homestead in Otonglo market, Kisumu. He had succumbed to injuries sustained in a brawl with the security detail of the wife of a former MP, with whom he had had an altercation during a drinking escapade. However, the general feeling was that Karl Marx was driven to his grave by a mixture of frustration, loneliness and heavy drinking.

On learning of his death, a friend in Dubai offered to buy him an expensive casket. Another offered to finance a befitting suit for his burial. Within no time, enough pledges were made to cater for the burial. Everyone seemed to want to give Karl Marx an opulent burial, even those who hadn’t been present in his life. In the end, having graduated with two degrees and having located himself inside Kenya’s public memory, Christopher Owiro went down in one of the most bizarre ways, as if he were sliding down a hole with slippery walls, with nowhere and nothing to hold onto.

Postscript

After the assassination of Oulu, a group of comrades and I, fearing for our lives, fled the country and sought asylum in Uganda, on the advice and assistance of the US ambassador. The supposition was we’d be in Uganda only for three months, but this turned into a year. There was a promise of being resettled in the US, one that seemed to grow more and more distant as time lapsed. As was my style before, during and after university, I sunk deep into the Kampala nightlife, often finding myself at 4am in a crowded nightclub, contemplating what future, if any, I had. There was a bleak sense that this was it. That all that time and energy invested in activism had gone to waste, and now here I was, stranded, disillusioned, an almost bitter recluse. By the time I came back to Kenya, I couldn’t deny that I was broken in more ways than one. One day, sitting with my father, replaying for him my Kampala experience, he told me he was grateful that I hadn’t descended into alcoholism. In his view, it appeared, I was facing the perfect combination of circumstances to become one. This meant a lot to me coming from him, since, growing up, I had seen him struggle with his drink. The words felt weightier.

Sitting in a post-exile safe house, a serviced apartment in Nairobi, the thought of writing the story of our activism crossed my mind. I took out my computer, and tried pretending that as a graduate of literature who never attended lectures, I somehow had it in me. I wrote part of my asylum-seeking story and shared it on Facebook. Then a publisher picked it up. Soon, writing about student activism grew into a trade. The more I wrote about contemporary student activism, the sports cars, the parties and the ideological bankruptcy, the more I realised that even if ours, or whatever was bequeathed to us by the likes of Oulu and Karl Marx, hadn’t been a golden age, at least there had been something meaningful to write home about.

This piece appears in the Chronic (April 2017). An edition which aims to complicate the questions raised by food insecurity, to cook and serve them differently.

Food is largely presented as scarcity, lack, loss – Africa’s always desperate exceptionalism or exceptional desperation or whatever. In this issue, we put food back on the table: to restore the interdependence between the mouth that eats and the mouth that speaks, and to delve deeper into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make food both a subversive art and a site of pleasure.

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